Configurable title bar buttons layout

[ilya-m32]

Hi @PolyMeilex,

First of all, thank you for this wonderful project. I was happy to notice that after getting an updated version of alacritty I have a much more consistent title bar in my gnome wayland session - thanks to the library.

Problem statement

One of the remaining inconsistencies (for my scenario) is that in the gnome shell you can move the close/minimize/maximize buttons to the left side, similar to how it was in Unity or now in OS X.

It's not really available via standard gnome settings but can be changed via gnome-tweaks or gsettings. The setting is also mentioned in the gnome documentation and seems to be widespread enough.

Possible solution

We could support this behavior in sctk-adwaita without adding dependencies from Gnome.

Button layout configuration is available via dbus-send, similar to dark mode detection:

$: dbus-send --session --print-reply=literal --reply-timeout=1000 --dest=org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.Read string:'org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences' string:'button-layout'

variant       variant          close,minimize,maximize:%

I played with the library a little bit and I was able to quickly make a proof of concept of configurable button layout in sctk-adwaita:

I also checked if there is a freedesktop spec for this, but unfortunately I couldn't find it.

Next steps

Will you theoretically accept MR with this feature if I convert my PoC to a real feature branch? If yes, then I am ready to do it in the near future.

Please let me know wdyt.

[PolyMeilex]

Sounds good, I would prefer the standardized key: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/996 instead of gnome one, but until that lands I'm ok with gnome specific solution.

[ilya-m32]

Great, I will follow up on this soon. Also good to see this property get standardized.

[orowith2os]

Nice to see my pull request being mentioned, if anyone has thoughts on how I have it laid out I'm all ears.